of the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice at Washington. Mr. Bielaski was on the stand for days at a time, and his testimony came as a distinct shock to those of us who heretofore had known little or nothing about the way in which our covert forces of espionage were combating those of Germany. It will not be needful to follow the records of the committee from day to day throughout the long period of its sittings, but some of the more important revelations made by Mr. Bielaski first may be brought to notice.
It was brought into the record, for publication later by the State Department, that there was a regular system of secret messages between Count von Bernstorff of the Imperial German Embassy at Washington, and the Berlin Foreign Office, by way of South America and Stockholm. All this time the Imperial German Ambassador was posing as a great friend of America, while in reality he was the chief of the German spy system in America—an example of all that a nobleman should not be.
It was shown by Mr. Bielaski that the German consul in Chicago, Reiswitz, suggested as long ago as 1915 that German interests ought to buy the Wright aeroplane factories in Dayton, Ohio, in an attempt to stop the shipment of aeroplanes to the Allies. Something stopped the shipment—let us suppose that it was not the efficiency of Germany so much as our own inefficiency, deplorable as that admission must be.
Nothing came of this attempt, nor of the attempt to control the Bridgeport Projectile Works, in any very conclusive and satisfactory fashion for Germany. A year later von Bernstorff begins to complain that German propaganda has not been producing much result. He cuts free from the German publication, "Fair Play," and declares that he would be glad to be well quit of George Sylvester Viereck's "Fatherland." He asks his imperial government to give him $50,000 more, with which he would like to start a monthly magazine in the United States. This was the beginning of those general revelations which exposed alike the clumsiness of German diplomacy, and the endeavor of German espionage as against our own.
Reiswitz was declared by Mr. Bielaski to have advised
